Dmytro Bazarov
/// Lead UI/UX Designer
Dmitry Bazarov is the Lead UI/UX Designer at Pingle Studio. His design expertise can be seen across titles like Insurgency: Sandstorm, the Five Nights at Freddy’s franchise, Poppy Playtime, and Tape to Tape, ensuring each interface feels both functional and immersive.
A game goes gold. Half the team rolls onto the next project, while a few people take their first breath of relief in months. And here it comes: the 80-person machine that shipped your game now becomes a 20-person crew keeping it steady.
This is also when the remaining crew picks DLC up alongside live patches and bug fixes, building it in the same branch, reviewed by the same leads, now doing three other jobs. When they’re stretched too thin, an external studio handles a content pack or an asset batch.
It works well enough until a merge conflict in the DLC branch takes down matchmaking on a Saturday and the postmortem calls it a “process issue”.
While we previously talked about why most DLCs underperform, this article is about the operating model of DLC expansion development that prevents it.
TL;DR
- DLC fails because of pipeline and ownership problems.
- Three things consistently have no clear owner: what the DLC should contain, whether it breaks the base game’s balance, and what happens after launch. We define it as The DLC Ownership Gap.
- Closing it takes three structural changes: a separate pipeline that can’t touch the live game, one producer who owns the full product, and post-launch support designed into the schedule before anything ships.
- On Insurgency: Sandstorm, we started as a porting crew and ended up running a 50-person content pipeline. One of our updates hit 98% positive Steam reviews.
Three gaps that kill DLC from the inside
DLC has always been financially separate from the base game, with its own budget and revenue targets. Operationally separate? Not so much. Studios build it inside the base game’s pipeline, on the base game’s schedule.
Across our DLC and LiveOps engagements, the same three things end up with no clear owner. We call it the DLC Ownership Gap:
- What the DLC should contain and why players would value it,
- Whether new content disrupts the base game’s balance, and
- What happens when players find problems after launch.
How to run DLC in parallel without touching the base game
This is how we structure DLC engagements at Pingle:
- The DLC team works in a separate environment from the live game. Nothing they build can reach the live build until it’s been tested. That’s parallel pipelines.
- One person owns the DLC from design through post-launch fixes, a single point of accountability for the whole product. That’s producer-led ownership.
- Post-launch support gets designed into the DLC schedule before anything ships. It’s not figured out after players find problems. That’s LiveOps thinking.
| Stage 1 | Stage 2 | Stage 3 |
| Parallel pipelines | Producer-led ownership | LiveOps thinking |
Parallel pipelines
| What it’s about: The DLC team works in a separate environment. Their work can’t physically touch the live game until it’s been tested. |
The DLC pipeline runs on its own branch, structurally separate from the live game’s main branch. The two pipelines share a codebase but run on separate workflows with separate teams, and integration happens at defined coordination points, planned and tested ahead of time.
This is what keeps the base game from breaking. More reviews and stricter merge protocols help up to a point. Under pressure, they degrade: someone merges at 11 PM without the full review chain, or a crunch sprint compresses the testing schedule until conflicts slip through. Structural separation holds because the architecture enforces it, regardless of how stretched the team gets.
Bungie solved this the same way when Destiny outgrew a single development branch. In a 2019 GDC talk, engineer Pete Kugler described how the team built infrastructure for feature branches, where small teams develop content in isolation while automated merging handles cross-branch integration. A stabilization branch sits between the feature work and the live game, catching anything that would break production. Protect the live game with architecture, and the content teams get room to build.
These two parallel pipelines still need to talk to each other. The base game needs code hooks and compatibility layers to receive DLC content, and someone has to plan when those integration windows happen. Integration becomes a scheduled event with testing built in: you decide when the branches converge, and you catch conflicts before they reach players.
Producer-led ownership
| What it’s about: One person owns the DLC from design through post-launch fixes. You have a single point of accountability. |
40-50% of the budget on a major title already goes to external teams, as highlighted during the GDC 2026 panel about the evolution of game development. When that money funds teams who execute tasks but don’t own the outcome, the three gaps from the previous section stay open, just with more people involved.
Each lead manages their domain well, and PMs keep tasks on track. But the questions that live between departments — does this DLC make sense as a product? Does this new content break the base game’s balance? Who owns the fix when players find a problem in week two? — those need someone whose job is the whole product.
On our AAA engagements, that’s a Pingle producer, one person with the authority to make scope calls and push back when something doesn’t serve the game.
LiveOps thinking without the live-service commitment
| What it’s about: Post-launch support for DLC from the start, so that it’s not figured out after players find problems. |
Most DLC ships and goes quiet. If something breaks or the balance is off, whoever’s available patches it between other priorities, and if nobody’s available, it waits. Your players will notice. They stop buying the next pack when the last one still feels unfinished.
We build a feedback loop into every DLC engagement from the start. Before launch, the team defines what to track and how (player behavior data, engagement patterns, purchase signals) so that when the content goes live, information starts coming back from day one. The team blocks out time to make adjustments after launch. That work is already in the plan and the budget.
On Insurgency: Sandstorm, for example, this meant running community playtests before every major release. Once content went live, our team also read Reddit and Steam threads to catch what the playtests missed.
Content ships, data comes back, the team adjusts, and the DLC earns its revenue over time instead of spiking at launch and going dark. We call this the LiveOps Loop — Content, Data, Iteration, Revenue — and it runs underneath every DLC engagement we take on.
Now, here’s how this looked like on a live FPS with 2+ million copies sold.
Insurgency: Sandstorm, or how a porting contract became a three-year partnership
When we started working on Insurgency: Sandstorm in 2020, we were a porting crew getting every asset reviewed by NWI’s art director. By the time the engagement ended three years later, our 50-person team was running the entire content pipeline of this live service game, and one of our updates had hit 98% positive Steam reviews.
NWI’s core team was moving on to new projects, and the game needed ongoing updates, technical support, and expansion to new platforms. They brought us in to handle the console port. In six months, we got the game through certification on PS4 and Xbox One with backward compatibility for current-gen consoles.
Half a year into the collaboration, NWI started handing us content work in small pieces: a weapon model here, a skin concept there. Within a year, we were producing concepts and delivering finals with minimal review.
Weapon models created by Pingle for Insurgency: Sandstorm
Our scope kept expanding. We built two original maps from scratch. Balanced both factions across every playable map. Our 3D artists produced the weapon models, character skins, and marketing art that shipped as paid cosmetic DLC: gear sets like Dealer, Mountain Nomad, Biker, and S.O.R.T.. The cosmetic revenue funded free content updates for the entire player base.
By the final year, our PM Serhii was managing 56 people across eight departments. The team ran daily syncs with department leads, a daily production call with NWI, weekly art reviews, and weekly publisher meetings with Focus Entertainment. NWI’s level design lead, who had met with us twice a week early on, now checked in once a quarter.
Mountain Nomad game skin for Insurgency: Sandstorm by Pingle Studio
The update we’re proudest of was the first major release our team delivered entirely on our own. It hit 98% positive Steam reviews. We were following Reddit and Steam feedback, adjusting balance based on what players experienced, and shaping each Operation around what the community wanted next.
Is your game ready for a producer-led DLC pipeline?
If your game is live, your core team is stretched, and DLC is on the roadmap, let’s talk about how to structure it. We scope every DLC engagement with a free consultation. Book yours here.
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